TEDxPortland: Roberta Conner

The name my grandmother gave me when I was 13 references a time when the glaciers were melting, and the land was flooding. It’s an old name.

100 years ago my grandmother was standing on the banks

take care of your body.

bears eat berries, birds eat berries, you are not the only consumer of these berries.

all things must be in balance: man and woman, day and night, abundance and scarcity.

when things are out of balance, you can tell. there will be more scarcity for some. you can tell when there is too much testosterone or estrogen in a room.

we are laying to rest the elders who learned languages as children, as opposed to those who are learning it today in the classroom.

we humans don’t make the earth turn, or the moon shine. we are humble.

indigenous cultures who are trying to keep their cultures alive are trying to protect an enormous database of ecological information that can protect us.

we know things like where there are condor habitat, that scientists don’t know.

there is no world for wilderness in our language because all places are known. all places are some indigenous tribes home.

culture and language teach us that we are not the most important thing. we are not in charge of the wildlife or animals.

the places with the lowest economic development have the greatest wildlife. the industrial revolution passed those places by. this is good. all things in balance.

indigenous names and languages help us maintain our store of knowledge. it is not meant to leave anyone out.

scientists and indigenous speakers need each other.

living in a place for thousand and thousands are empirical and longitudinal. it’s not double blind, but we know what a place’s carrying capacity is. we know what happens when a place is overhunted or overpopulated.

we know that roads don’t belong in river bottoms. we know that garbage and pollution cannot accumulate.

live as though your ancestors thousands of years from now will live in your backyard.

A.I. Apocalypse: Leon Tsarev is coerced into writing a computer virus. The virus, written on biological principles, evolves out of control, halting all the world's computers, including emergency services, transportation, and payment systems. As deaths mount, it becomes a race against time to restore the computers, except that the virus has other plans.